Can a Plant Heal Cancer Patients? Bringing to Light the Research of Mirko Beljanski by JANET RAE-DUPREE
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Why did farmers and settlers write the Bible? Nature is the best business consultant Women lead fight over GMO labeling SUMMER 2016 Flower power CANCER THE EVOLUTION OF THE BIBLE Can this plant heal cancer? PLUS Hallucinogens GMO LABELING in Christianity NATURAL BUSINESS STONE PAPER VOLUME 22, ISSUE 2 THEOPTIMIST.COM $9.99 U.S. / $9.99 CANADA / € 9,75 EU SUMMER 2016 / VOLUME 22, ISSUE 2 PRO EUROPE! P. 25 24 COVER STORY Can a plant heal cancer patients? Bringing to light the research of Mirko Beljanski BY JANET RAE-DUPREE 78 Stone paper 34 The next big environmental thing? The fight for BY KARIN KLEIN GMO labeling Seriously, are GMOs safe? BY MARY MACVEAN COVER PHOTOGRAPH: THE BELJANSKI FOUNDATION COVER PHOTOGRAPH: Table of Contents Summer 2016 42 66 The Bible: A new look at an old book Natural Two provocative excerpts about the Bible Entrepreneurship BY CAREL VAN SCHAIK AND KAI MICHEL Principles for sustainable business BY JERRY B. BROWN AND JULIE M. BROWN BY ROB WILLIAMS PHOTOS BY BRUCE HEINEMAN STORIES POSSIBILITY, INCLUDING: 13 Mars company gets healthy HEALTH & HEALING LIFE 14 Drones that save lives 24 Can a plant heal 66 Nature is the best 15 Pollution: a civil rights violation cancer patients? business consultant 17 LocoL food in L.A. Mirko Beljanski’s research into plants that Principles for sustainable business found in 21 The European Union: can affect and heal cancer is finally getting nature that can change the way you think just a big friendly club the respect it deserves. about business and the world around you. 23 Toward a more civil political discourse 34 The fight for SUSTAINABILITY & INNOVATION GMO labeling REGULARS 78 Rock, paper, progress The debate rages as anti-GMO activists 06 Community push the United States to join more than A new stone-based paper from Taiwan may 08 Ode to: Zuzana Caputova five dozen countries that have mandatory save the forests—or just create a recycling food package labeling. conundrum. 10 Ode to: the American buffalo 41 Column: Paulo Coelho SPIRIT 64 Living Possibility: Dear Roz 42 New look at an old book 83 Column: Amy Domini Excerpts from The Good Book of Human 85 Inspiration: Books and products Nature: An Evolutionary Reading of the Bible 88 A better place: City life and The Psychedelic Gospels: The Secret History of Hallucinogens in Christianity 58 Handiwork of the heart An excerpt from Pathways to Possibility that offers a story to help in creating connections that are missing in our lives. Health and Healing Can a plant heal cancer patients? The research of Mirko Beljanski, the “father of environmental medicine,” is getting the respect it deserves, 18 years after his death. BY JANET RAE-DUPREE 24 THEOPTIMIST.COM SUMMER 2016 PHOTOGRAPHS: THE BELJANSKI FOUNDATION SOUTH AMERICAN INDIGENOUS PEOPLE TRADITIONALLY USED PAO PEREIRA. SUMMER 2016 THEOPTIMIST.COM 25 eloid leukemia. French news media didn’t cover the raid. There were no press releases about the Beljanskis’ arrest. No criminal trial ever took place. A European Union court later found he was denied due process and the government was ordered to cover his legal fees. So why were the Beljanskis arrested? And how did Mirko Beljanski’s lifelong re- search path come to open new avenues for treating cancer and, possibly, preventing its development in the first place? Over the course of his four decades of research, Bel janski came to be viewed as a scientific pariah by colleagues at the same time his discoveries were credited with curing cases of pancreatic cancer, breast cancer, prostate cancer and even AIDS. The story begins in post–World War II Serbia, where in 1946 the Yugoslavian gov- ernment granted Beljanski a two-year educa- tional fellowship to study in Paris. Recently relieved from his duties fighting the German DR. MIRKO BELJANSKI invasion, 22-year-old Beljanski moved to AT WORK IN HIS LAB. Paris and enrolled at the Sorbonne, where he discovered a passion for biochemistry and biological research. After the World Health HEN FRENCH OFFICIALS Rumors had circulated that the late French Organization gave him a second two-year order troops from the Na- president François Mitterand was using grant, Beljanski was hired in 1951 by the tional Gendarmerie Inter- some of the lab’s products to fight his pros- Pasteur Institute’s Department of Chemical vention Group, or GIGN, tate cancer before it had ultimately killed Biology to complete his doctoral work. toW apprehend a criminal suspect, it’s a cer- him a few months earlier. Other than that, These were the early days of genetics tainty that a truly nasty character is about Saint-Prim’s 800 or so residents knew little and molecular biology. James Watson and to be taken down. These elite anti-terrorist about what went on at CIRIS. Francis Crick were still two years away from soldiers—brought together for special forces Abruptly, soldiers broke down the main unveiling the curiously twisted double-helix training following the Munich Olympics building’s front door, ordering its sleeping structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA. massacre in 1974—have freed hostages occupants from their beds and handcuffing Penicillin, the first antibiotic, had been in from hijacked airliners and remote island their primary target—73-year-old Yugo- use for only a decade. Other antibiotics were caves, guarded Olympians and French gov- slavia-born biochemist Mirko Beljanski, trickling to market, but researchers already ernment leaders, quelled prison riots and ar- “the father of environmental medicine.” were seeing signs that bacteria had begun to rested France’s most wanted criminals for It took nearly 12 hours to load the lab’s resist the medicine’s curative effects. more than four decades. equipment, voluminous files, research notes Asked to investigate this antibiotic re- So when several dozen heavily armed and experimental materials into a caravan sistance, Beljanski discovered that bacteria GIGN soldiers blocked all roads into the of trucks. During that time, teams of secur- able to survive an antibiotic onslaught ac- small hamlet of Saint-Prim, in the coun- ity forces conducted similar raids and con- cumulate a larger internal supply of RNA, try’s Rhône-Alpes region, at sunrise on fiscations at the lab’s suppliers elsewhere in or ribonucleic acids, than do the same type October 9, 1996, villagers knew to keep France and at Beljanski’s Paris apartment, of bacteria that have never been exposed to their distance. where his wife of 45 years, fellow researcher antibiotics. (RNA, a molecule in the same Stealthily, the troops surrounded a former Monique Lucas Beljanski, also was arrested. family as DNA but formed with a single winery estate on the Rhône River where sci- Two years after the laden trucks rolled “backbone” rather than DNA’s double back- entists had established a nonprofit laboratory out of Saint-Prim—months after govern- bone, performs a number of roles inside cells called the Center of Scientific Innovation, ment agents had rounded up and destroyed related to the production of proteins and ex- Research and Information (CIRIS) to seek CIRIS’s plant extracts and dietary supple- pression of genes.) alternative cancer and AIDS treatments. ments—Mirko Beljanski died of acute my- The discovery made Beljanski one of the 26 THEOPTIMIST.COM SUMMER 2016 first molecular biologists to study RNA and and genes called all the shots, and the Bel- its role in cell regulation. His work ultim- janskis’ work was no longer in favor. Un- Beljanski came to be ately upended the previous accepted wisdom daunted, Beljanski continued looking for about what makes cancerous cells different new types of RNA. And he found them. viewed as a scientific from normal cells and brings us to today’s So-called transforming RNA could move ongoing research at centers in the United information from one species of bacteria to pariah by colleagues States, where the plant extracts he refined another and then insert that information into are making advances against prostate, pan- the new species’ DNA. Subsequent genera- at the same time his creatic, ovarian and even brain cancer and tions of this species could then inherit these the RNA fragments he synthesized helped new genetic traits. discoveries were 70 patients in a 2010 clinical study complete Beljanski began experimenting with their full schedule of chemotherapy. customized RNA fragments able to protect credited with curing otherwise healthy cells in cancer patients ELJANSKI’S CAREER BEGAN AT THE from the destructive effects of chemother- cases of pancreatic, same time that the field of molecu- apy and radiation. Noting that the immune breast and prostate Blar biology did, with the discovery systems of cancer patients often became of how DNA’s double helix stores and de- dangerously depressed during treatment, he ploys genetic information. For more than 40 focused his efforts on bone marrow stem cancer and AIDS. years, molecular biologists focused solely on cells—the birthplace of critical immune sys- genetics, protein expression and how muta- tem components like white blood cells and tions to genes could cause cancer. Study the platelets. Ultimately, he synthesized RNA “letters” of the genetic alphabet, the theory fragments he dubbed “primers” that act like went, and you would spot “typos” that lead an accelerant on bone marrow stem cells, to cancer. Figure out how to prevent those prompting them to generate critical new im- typos and you could learn how to stop can- mune system cells to replace any destroyed cer in its tracks. during chemotherapy. But Beljanski demonstrated that the pri- Beljanski’s research continued to under- mary physical difference between normal cut more broadly accepted theories around and cancerous DNA lies within the structure genetic mutations and RNA’s one-way of the double helix itself.